Theatre Review: Importance of Being Earnest

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 16 March 2011 05:00

Written by Lucy Komisar

The Importance of Being Earnest
Written by Oscar Wilde
Directed by Brian Bedford
Sets and Costumes by Desmond Heeley
Starring Brian Bedford, Sara Topham, Dana Ivey, Charlotte Parry, David Furr, Santino Fontana, Paxton Whitehead

Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest delightfully skewers British upper classes

The genius of Oscar Wilde’s skewering of the British upper classes circa 1895 is that his satire is rather gentle, even affectionate, but his pointed steel neatly pierces the targets. In his deft and delightful The Importance of Being Earnest, he manages to get a few licks in at the literary establishment as well. All is done with enormous wit and panache, and not a trace of meanness.

In the world that Wilde describes, members of the upper classes are useless, though some have wrong-headed convictions and other are merely frivolous. Even Lady B seems a Gorgon, but not necessarily an evil one. Theirs is world where people go to dinner and tea and back and forth between townhouses with servants and country estates with servants.

Where pedigree is all, what could be more distressing to Lady Bracknell than a suitor for her daughter Gwendolen (Sara Topham), who appears to have none? Worthing (David Furr) not only doesn’t have appropriate parents, but as an infant was left in a leather satchel in the Victoria Station cloakroom. The satchel was given by mistake to a rich country gentleman, Thomas Cardew, who adopted the foundling and named him Worthing because the man had a ticket to Worthing in his pocket. And then there’s his first name, on which hangs a long joke of the play.

Worthing has been brought up in privilege, endowed with class values. He is a traditional, serious, intense man committed to the social system, including marriage.

Not so his pal, Lady Bracknell’s nephew, the buffoonish Algernon Moncrieff (Santino Fontana), who comes with a pedigree and insists that nobody of their class works.

Gwendolen ridicules convention by making Worthing go down on one knee to propose. The plot thickens because both men practice deception -- Worthing to get away from the Shropshire country estate where he lives with his ward, Cecily (Charlotte Parry), the granddaughter of his benefactor; and Algie to escape from town.

At the estate, we see how stultifying social rules also afflict the lower middle classes. Miss Prism (Dana Ivey), Cecily’s governess, is as stolid as Lady B and as tightly tied by propriety. But her infatuation with the Rector (Paxton Whitehead) lights a spark that makes her seem about to burst with suppressed desire.

From a critic of the upper classes, Wilde moves to a fonder spoof of the fanciful absurdities of romance. Cecily, for example, writes everything in her diary, including fantasized engagement letters.

Wilde spices the script with wonderful literary digs and bons mots. Algernon tells Worthing, "Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow. Don’t try it. You should leave that to people who haven’t been at a University. They do it so well in the daily papers."

The Rector notes that he has preached his sermon on the meaning of the manna in the wilderness as a charity talk on behalf of the Society for the Prevention of Discontentment among the Upper Classes.

We learn from Lady B that the university extension service is sponsoring a lecture on "The Influence of a Permanent Income on Thought."

The production owes much to the flawless direction and acting of Brian Bedford. He is powerful in his portrayal of the dominating matriarch Lady Bracknell, the epitome of the hypocrisy and shallowness of British aristocrats that the Irishman Wilde found insufferable.

Though Bedford is a man playing a woman, this character does not appear as a man in drag. Bedford’s visage is screwed into a permanent frown or glower. His character is chilling, heavy in spirit as well as size, rather like a general who goes around shaking his rules like a stick, yet whose genuflection to station can be overcome by money.

The fetching Topham seems to float and flutter like a white bird on the wings of her chirpy, trilling voice. Parry has a comic seductiveness as the breathless ingénue.

Worthing is finely portrayed by Furr, and Algernon is captured well by the quirky, appealing Fontana. Ivey is brilliant, shaky and high-pitched. Her mouth is pulled down, but her eyes sparkle and roll.

Desmond Heeley’s stunning sets and costumes move the action from a pale violet London drawing room to a gorgeous garden and summer house where the elegantly clad ladies -- and I include Lady Bracknell -- turn and preen.

This production is in every respect a charmer.

The Importance of Being Earnest
Roundabout Theatre Company
American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd Street, New York
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org
Opened Jan 13, 2011; closes July 3, 2011.

(After the March 20th performance, Jayne Houdyshell replaces Dana Ivey as Miss Prism, Brian Murray replaces Paxton Whitehead as the Rector, and Jessie Austrian replaces Sara Topham as Gwendolen Fairfax.)

For more by Lucy Komisar, visit thekomisarscoop.com.

Review: New York Youth Symphony

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 15 March 2011 02:32

Written by Jack Angstreich

On the afternoon of Sunday, March 13th, 2011, I had the pleasure of enjoying the excellent musicians of the New York Youth Symphony perform, under the estimable direction of Ryan McAdams, at a concert mostly devoted to Russian composers, at Carnegie Hall.

Modest Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, in the orchestration by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, is one of the most familiar works in the classical repertory. But it was a bracing -- and thrilling -- experience to hear the powerful original orchestration by Mussorgsky himself, as the opening piece in the program -- indeed this version received its New York premiere played by this very ensemble in 1983. One exciting element here was the stronger sense of the folk-music inspiration underlying the work's genesis than can be perceived in the Rimsky-Korsakov arrangement. The players sounded superb as they did, too, in the next piece performed, Sergei Prokofiev's extraordinary and delightful Overture on Hebrew Themes.

The New York Youth Symphony has a tradition of commissioning new works by young composers to be premiered at its concerts. On this program we heard the world premiere of Christopher Cerrone's haunting Still Life with Violin and Orchestra. The eccentric, up-and-coming virtuoso Hahn-Bin -- perhaps as much a performance-artist as an outstanding musician -- brought a flamboyant theatrical dimension to the space as he took the stage to play, exquisitely, the beautiful solo-violin line.

The concert concluded, triumphantly, with a rousing account of the great, unsettling masterpiece, the celebrated Fifth Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich.

New York Youth Symphony
Conducted by Ryan McAdams
Violin Solo by Hahn-Bin
Music of Modest Mussorgsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Christopher Cerrone, Dmitri Shostakovich

Carnegie Hall
57th Street at Seventh Avenue
New York City
March 13, 2011

Kevin's March '11 Digital Week II

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 14 March 2011 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week
Au Revoir Les Enfants
(Criterion)
Louis Malle’s best film is a beautifully observed 1988 drama of friendship and betrayal in a French Catholic boarding school during the Nazi occupation: young boys enjoy true bonding until the inevitable occurs. Often, Malle’s choice of material drove whether the film was successful: here, every frame is suffused with emotion but no trace of sentimentality. The splendid young actors are a testament to Malle’s subtle handling of performers.

The muted visuals, in keeping with the melancholy, eventually tragic subject matter, are precisely rendered in Criterion’s estimable hi-def treatment; the extras, from Criterion’s Malle boxed set, include interviews with Malle’s widow Candice Bergen and his biographer Pierre Billard, a profile of the character of Joseph, a 1988 Malle audio interview, and Chaplin’s classic short The Immigrant (seen in the film).

Excalibur
(Warners)
John Boorman’s personal adaptation of the legend of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table finally made it to the screen in 1981. While visually impressive, with shots and entire sequences of the most exquisitely articulated grandeur (helped by Wagner’s music from The Ring and Parsifal, no doubt), much of the film is dramatically remote, even inert at times.

This despite a classy cast comprising Nigel Terry, Helen Mirren, Cherie Lunghi, Nicol Williamson and youngsters Gabriel Byrne and Liam Neeson. For its 30th anniversary, Warners has treated Excalibur to a fine hi-def transfer, although the lone extra is Boorman’s chatty, informative and quite comprehensive audio commentary.

The Next Three Days
(LionsGate)
Russell Crowe plays an ordinary college professor whose life is turned upside down when his wife (the always charming Elizabeth Banks) is arrested for murder in this standard thriller with plot holes the size of the SUV its star drives. Writer-director Paul Haggis leaves far too much dangling, sacrificing credible tension for nonsensical excitement that’s typified by a head-scratching climax.

It’s all faintly ludicrous, with the furrow-browed Crowe outshined by Banks, the fine Ty Simpkins as their son and Olivia Wilde, who brightens the stock part of a young mother who helps (but doesn’t sleep with) Crowe in his time of need. The movie receives an excellent hi-def transfer, while the extras include an audio commentary, making-of featurettes, and deleted and extended scenes.

DVDs of the Week
The Clowns
(Raro Video)
Federico Fellini’s homage to the circus of his youth was made for Italian TV in 1970, which may be why it never got a DVD release in the U.S. until now: for that, thank the Italian company Raro Video, making its stateside debut as a home video distributor. Self-indulgent, impish and nostalgic by turns, this is Fellini at his most innocuous…but even second-tier Fellini has its magical moments.

Raro has added enticing extras to the mix, since the print of the film (although supposedly restored) looks only somewhat better than a VHS tape: there’s an early Fellini short, 1953’s The Marriage Agency; a visual essay by Adriano Apra, Fellini’s Circus, 42 minutes of alternating interesting and redundant info; and a superb 50-page booklet that includes Fellini’s own notes and delightful drawings.

A Film Unfinished
(Oscilloscope)
Yael Hersonski’s documentary may be the last word in Holocaust films, since it utilizes raw footage shot by the Nazis in 1942 of the infamous Warsaw Ghetto. This footage was first thought authentic when first uncovered, but is now seen as mostly staged for propaganda purposes; the film goes through a tangled mass of multiple meanings to sort out truth from fiction. We also see reactions of survivors who were no more than children then and are in their 80s now, ranging from horror to sorrow and everything in between.

This important historical and artistic document is reinforced by contextual extras: interviews with Holocaust researcher Adrian Wood and Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, and Death Mills, a 1945 film shot by Billy Wilder and distributed by the U.S. government to show Germans the realities of the concentration camps.

Paula-Paula
The Sinister Eyes of Dr. Orloff
(Intervision)
Spanish director Jess Franco’s soft-core forays into murder and madness have earned him a cult following as a master of Euro-sleaze, and these two films show that not much has changed in his lengthy career: 1973’s Sinister Eyes is a ludicrous horror movie about a cripple young woman at the mercy of the nutty title doctor, while 2010’s Paula-Paula is a nearly plotless erotic fantasy that consists mostly of two nubile young woman dancing and pawing each other in front of the camera for our (and Franco’s) amusement.

If you like this sort of thing, you already know you‘re going to watch: if you’re even the tiniest bit unsure, you should probably stay away. Both releases include interviews with Franco.

CD of the Week
Strauss: Orchestral Lieder
(Virgin Classics)
In this aural embarrassment of riches, Diana Damrau wraps her lovely soprano voice around 22 songs by Richard Strauss accompanied by the first-rate Munich Philharmonic under the sensitive direction of conductor Christian Thielemann. We already know from his operas that Strauss was a master of the orchestra, as the swelling, sobbing, melting and emotional sound worlds of Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Daphne, and Capriccio, among others, has proven.

Here, we hear some of his best and most gorgeous songs, from “Morgen!” and “Cacilie” to all six of the Brentano-Lieder, given the voluptuous deluxe treatment by the orchestra and Damrau, whose impassioned interpretations are something special.